A Day without Social Media

One of the things you must be wondering is why did I go one day without social media? Well, A) it all started as a school project; B) Social Media is a huge social issue (now I know that); C) I wanted to become aware  of how addicted I was D) I wanted to challenge myself

As you can see, I had a lot of motives, and honestly going without social media was easier said than done. But before I start telling you my experience, I will tell you why social media addiction is a problem.

Social media addiction is an issue because it has negative impacts on mental health. It can worsen anxiety and depression, and lower self-esteem. It also, as many of you have probably noticed, affects productivity and sleeping patterns, which is due to light emitted by our smartphone which reduces the production of melatonin (the hormone that makes us fall asleep).

I found out about all of this after doing some research for a group project. For this, we were supposed to come up with a campaign to fight an issue. We decided to pick Social Media addiction, and we were going to create a challenge about going one day without social media to build awareness. The whole team was not required to do the challenge. But I was curious about how addicted I was, and mainly I was interested in knowing how much I relied on social media, and how much time I spent on it.

The challenge sounded easy enough, but then I realized that social media was more than Facebook and Instagram. It included YouTube, WhatsApp and a lot more platforms that I was not even aware they were social media until I decided to do the challenge.  And to be honest, the one that I knew was going to be harder to avoid was YouTube, because I have this almost immediate response to open YouTube as soon as I open my computer. WhatsApp was also tricky, because being an international student, it works as my primary method to communicate with my family, but it was easy to avoid by letting people know that I was going to be unavailable.

So how did it go?

Well, as predicted YouTube was the real enemy. I had throughout the day the impulse of trying to use YouTube for all types of reasons; from entertainment like watching top 10s and movie trailers to informative motives like suddenly wanting to watch something that would explain the homeless situation in the U.K (legit!). I substituted YouTube with Netflix, but even doing that I still had to fight the urge of using YouTube, and I realized that it was because of the duration of the videos. I felt like Netflix shows were too long for the time I had, and I needed something that would accommodate my time better. However, I succeeded in not using YouTube, so yay for me.

For other social media platforms, it helped a lot that I was mentally prepared to know that I could not open it. It was handy to tell close people that they should not use WhatsApp to contact me because I did not feel like I was missing something as I knew that they could reach me using other methods of communication.

Instagram was not an issue at the beginning, but as the day went by, it turned tricky. This was because I have developed the tendency of scrolling through Instagram while doing small activities that have me waiting for a couple of minutes, like using the microwave. This meant that without Instagram, I was suddenly paying more attention to labels and finding unexpected reading sources.

Conclusion

    Overall, I can say that not using social media for a day helped me to increase productivity and it felt nice not being available all the time. However, there is a but, which is that I found myself bored at times. It was almost like social media had substituted other sources of entertainment that I used to enjoy more before. This only added to my awareness that I had let social media influence way too much how I spent my free time, and I need to change that.

To conclude, I would probably do the challenge again because I noticed that nothing bad happens if you are not 24 hrs connected to social media,   and as I said before it felt nice not to use it as much. It felt almost liberating

Recommendations

If you want to do the challenge, some recommendations I would give you are

1. Let people know that you are not going to be available through social media, so you don’t go crazy with notifications.

2. Have a list of things to do, so you know how to fill up your time.

3. Before going to sleep, try reading a book or do something that does not involve a screen.

4. If you think that it’s going to be difficult to avoid social media, but you want to try the challenge, move all your social media accounts to a folder in your phone ( so, it is more difficult to get to them) and turn off notifications.